Viviase drove away.
I stood for a few seconds looking back at the house through the gate. The front door was closed now. I got in my car and waited. I waited over half an hour before Obermeyer came through the front door, got into his Lexus, and hummed down the driveway toward the gate, which opened for him.
He turned right. I followed him.
He drove north on Midnight Pass Road and made a right turn at Stickney Point. He pulled into the mall on his right just before Tamiami Trail, parked, and headed for a bar. I got out of my car after he went through the door and followed him.
There was no music coming from inside when I opened the door. There was a hockey game on the television over the bar. The sound wasn’t on. The place wasn’t full but it wasn’t doing badly.
I spotted Obermeyer. He was seated by himself in a booth toward the back near the rest-room sign. I found a seat on the other side of the room where I could watch him with no chance of his seeing me.
A waitress brought me a beer and a plate of nachos with salsa. I looked up at the television screen and watched two men on skates go after each other with wooden sticks. One of the men had a very bloody nose.
I had a beer and a half and two plates of nachos while Obermeyer had four drinks of something something dark and brown with no ice in the next forty minutes while he watched the hockey game. He watched, but I had the feeling he wasn’t seeing it. When he put the fourth drink down and looked as if he were trying to decide to go for number five, get up and drive home, or asked for a designated driver, I decided it was time. I took my almost flat second beer and moved over to sit across from Obermeyer, who looked up at me. I could see he was trying to place me.
“You were at Kevin’s,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I just stopped for a drink,” he said, as if there might be any other reason for being in a bar even if you did like nachos.
“Me too,” I said, holding up my glass to show him. “Trasker’s really sick,” I said somberly.
“Very sick,” Obermeyer agreed. “A very sick man. He’s lucky to have friend like Kevin.”
“Who needs enemies?” I said.
“What?”
“With a friend like Kevin Hoffmann, who needs enemies?” I explained.
“Oh,” said Obermeyer, finishing his drink. “You’re wrong.”
Obermeyer held his liquor well, but I wondered what his blood-alcohol level was. Something was bothering him. The man had needed a drink. The man had needed four drinks and he looked toward the bar as if he might be considering number five.
“Trasker is dying,” I said.
“Everybody is dying,” Obermeyer said with a knowing doctor’s smile. “It’s the one fact my profession has to accept as a certainty. All we can do, if we don’t screw up, is forestall the inevitable.”
“Some of us take more time dying than others,” I said. “Trasker…”
“Days, weeks, maybe even a month or more, but if I were one who bet on morbidity, I’d say he’s closer than a few days to the end.”
“He in pain?” I asked.
“Nothing we can’t control.”
“You mean shots?”
“We’ve got painkillers that could make you ignore a cannonball hole right through your stomach.”
“That doesn’t happen very often, though, does it? I mean a cannonball hole through someone’s stomach.”
He grinned and waved at the bartender, deciding another drink would be a very good idea.
“We’re in Sarasota, Florida,” Obermeyer said. “I’ve seen people who’ve lost their arms to sharks, had sunstroke that sent their temperature to one hundred and eight and survived, children hit by cars driven by ancient drivers who should have been declared legally blind.”
“So Trasker is sedated.”
“He is, to put it clinically, so far out of it that he can look back at the earth and see with clarity the floating eyeball of a corn snake.”
“Colorfully put,” I said.
“Thanks,” Obermeyer said, looking up to hurry his drink. “Stanley recite any poetry for you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Smug little prick,” said the doctor as his drink was delivered.
“So if Trasker wasn’t sedated, his pain could be handled with something, morphine maybe?”
“Maybe,” said Obermeyer.
He took a large sip.
“Normally, I don’t drink like this,” he said. “Normally, I drink a hell of a lot more when I’ve got something to drink about. But medical science is a wonderful thing. I’ve got a variety of options that keep me functional.”
A group of people at the bar groaned. I looked back over my shoulder. The television was flashing the score. The Tampa Bay Lightning were losing to Boston, four to one.
“So, if you took Trasker off of sedation and gave him a shot or two, maybe one of your options, he could walk around, talk?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.
“But…” I began as he lifted his glass again and held up his free hand to stop me.
“I’m drunk,” he said. “I’m not a fool. Ask me now. Ask me in the morning. Ask me on the witness stand and I say I’m treating William Trasker properly. And given his condition, it would be the truth.”
“Kevin Hoffmann’s got a lot of money,” I said.
“One hell of a lot of money,” Obermeyer agreed, holding his glass and looking at the contents he swirled in a small circle. “And he gives it generously.”
“Any causes you’re particularly interested in?”
“A campaign to build a center for state-of-the-art treatment of heart disease near the airport,” he said. “A state-of-the-art center which I will have the honor of heading and for which I am already a leading candidate as first patient.”
I dropped a five-dollar bill on the table to cover my two drinks and tip and stood up.
“You understand?” Obermeyer asked, as if he really needed understanding for whatever he was doing for Hoffmann.
“I understand,” I said.
“I’ll tell you a secret, Mr…”
“Fonesca.”
“Mr. Fonesca. I’m really a good doctor, but that’s not what I was going to tell you. I’m a little overweight. I drink too much, have a slight cardiac problem, and I’ve got an arthritic knee but I could come close to shutting Kevin Hoffmann out every time we get on the court. He has no backhand. His forehand has no power and my nearsighted eight-year-old niece could return his serve. I have to cover for him in doubles to keep us in most matches and I have to do it without letting him know. Now that, Mr. Fonseca-”
“Fonesca.”
“Fonesca, sorry, that is hard work. Kevin Hoffmann is not the athlete he thinks he is and maybe, some day, when I think I have nothing left to lose, I’ll wipe his ass on the tennis court so badly that he’ll realize I’ve been kissing that ass for years and he…Enough.”
I left him and went back out to the parking lot.
Stanley, hands folded in front of him, stood in front of my rented Nissan, watching me.
“You read?” Stanley asked as I stopped in front of him.
There was traffic in the parking lot and the lights were bright.
“I’m basically literate,” I said. “But I prefer old movies.”
“Never could get into movies,” Stanley said, adjusting his glasses. “Books? You can lose yourself in a poem, in a book, go to another space, time, world, a place better or worse than the one we’re in, but definitely far from it.”
“Kevin Hoffmann a reader?”
“A patron of the arts,” Stanley said. “Theater, opera, symphony, ballet.”
“And baseball.”
“And baseball,” Stanley agreed. “Dr. Obermeyer drinks a little.”
“Dr. Obermeyer drinks a lot,” I said.
“And when he drinks he talks.”
“He talks,” I agreed.
“Mr. Hoffmann would prefer that you not talk to D
r. Obermeyer.”
“I can appreciate that.”
“Mr. Hoffmann will be upset if you talk to Dr. Obermeyer again.”
“Upset?”
“‘Who wills to know what weal awaits him, must first learn the ill that God for him hath wrought.’ Benvenuto Cellini wrote that in his autobiography.”
“And it means?”
“Simply put,” Stanley said, “if you talk to the doctor again, you’ll discover something bad waiting for you.”
There really wasn’t much more to say.
Stanley walked toward the bar. I had the feeling Dr. Obermeyer was about to have a new drinking partner. I wondered what Stanley’s drink of choice might be. I guessed Diet Sprite.
10
It was Thursday night, a little before nine. The rain had started again. It wasn’t much of a rain but it was enough to hide the moon and stars and give me a feeling of protective isolation from people.
Traffic going north on Tamiami Trail was light, but there was the usual cast of coastal Florida characters on the road. I passed the infirmed and ancient, weak of sight, hearing, and judgment, hunching forward to squint into the darkness, driving twenty miles under the speed limit, trying not to admit to themselves that they were afraid of driving. These senior drivers were a potential menace, but I understood their loneliness, their unwillingness to give up driving and lose even more of their contact with the world.
Then there were the grinning kids in late-model cars or pickup trucks. They took chances, cut people off, and were unaware that death was a reality. You might challenge death fifty, a hundred, two hundred times, but the one time you lost, the game was over. They didn’t consider losing. The game was everything.
There were families on their way back from somewhere or someone, one or two children sleeping in the backseat, mother and father in the front listening to the radio, just wanting to make it home and to bed for a few hours.
And then there was me.
I stopped at the video store a block from the DQ. They specialized in Spanish-language movies, but had a good collection of American movies from the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, most of them second-generation copies.
Eduardo, overweight, sagging eyes, too-small button-down shirt, sat behind the counter at the back of the small store. He nodded when I walked in. Eduardo had been an almost promising middleweight in the late Seventies. Time had been no more kind to him than it had to me.
I didn’t think I would find what I was looking for, but I did. I almost missed it. It was one I hadn’t seen before called Forbidden Destiny. I recognized the title, knew who was in it. I found it in the bin of overused tapes for sale in a plain white box with the title printed in ink on the spine. I gave Eduardo three dollars.
“Rain,” Eduardo said, looking out the window. “Bad for business. I think I’ll just close up early and get a beer at the Crisp Dollar Bill. You want to come?”
“Tired,” I said. “Busy day.”
Eduardo understood tired. I don’t think he knew much about busy days. He nodded.
When I got to my office just before ten, I found a message on the machine from Sally. “Lew, call when you get this if it’s before ten.”
I called.
“Hello,” said Susan, Sally’s daughter. Susan was eleven and was convinced that every time the phone rang it was for her.
“It’s me, Lew,” I said.
“I’ll get her,” Susan said, and put down the phone.
I could hear the television playing. The voice sounded like George Clooney in serious mode.
“It’s Mr. Sunshine, Mom,” Susan called.
“Dork,” said Michael, who was going to be fifteen some time soon. “He can probably hear you.”
“Lew?”
“Mr. Sunshine himself,” I said.
“I have to talk to you about the Severtsons. I need to fill out a report and I want to quote you in it.”
“Ken Severtson wants custody of the kids,” I guessed. “And he wants a divorce.”
“Neither,” she said. “I talked to them a few hours ago. They’re going to stay together.”
“For the kids,” I said.
“It’s always for the kids,” she said. “Even when it’s the worst thing that can happen to the kids. Well, almost the worst thing.”
The light in my office came from a line of fluorescent overheads, two of which were out, one of which was flickering and pinging. I could see the painting, the Dalstrom painting of the black forest and the single colorful flower.
“You think the kids should be taken away from the Severtsons?” I asked.
“It doesn’t much matter what I think. There’s not a judge in the state who would take kids away from parents who aren’t criminal offenders, don’t take drugs, and don’t beat the kids. But a detective in Orlando faxed a report to the sheriff’s office here, and the sheriff’s office sent me a copy.”
“Which says?”
“Mother and children present at a suspicious death. Mother in bed with a man who wasn’t her husband. Family bears watching. We add that to the complaint about them from before and…I don’t know.”
“What?”
“Report on Stark,” she said. “Lost his wife. Had some trouble with the law when he was young, but he’s been a regular churchgoer for years. Upstanding businessman. Volunteer at the food bank.”
“And child molester?” I added.
“Nothing in his past and no proof but Janice Severtson’s word,” said Sally. “Neither child remembers ever being touched by Stark.”
“It would have happened. It was about to happen.”
“But it didn’t,” Sally said. “Can you do me a favor and write out your version of what you know happened, what she told you, how Kenny and Sydney behaved? I’ll attach it to my report and list you as a semiretired former member of the Office of State Attorney of Cook County, Illinois.”
“When do you need it?”
“Soon,” she said. “Tomorrow? The kids want to go to the movies Saturday. How about coming over here for dinner and you join us?”
Sally couldn’t help it. It was her mission. Saving children and reclusive process servers. She knew I didn’t like going to the movies. I preferred my cot, something old in black-and-white, and being alone. She had made progress with me. I had gone out to restaurants alone with Sally five times, and seven or eight times with her and kids. The kids liked The Bangkok. Susan liked getting a sugar high on Thai iced tea.
The rain started to come down harder. I could hear it beating on the concrete outside my door.
“Dinner is fine,” I said. “I’ll let you know about the movie.”
“I was just joking when I called you Mr. Sunshine,” Susan suddenly came on.
“I know,” I said. “You know any real jokes?”
“Sure. Blond jokes. Lots of them. Why?”
“I’m collecting them for a friend I have to see in the morning.”
Susan told me a joke. I jotted it down in my notebook and thanked her and then Sally came back on.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Afternoon. I have to be in court in the morning. Another crack child is going to be given back to his mother who just got out of rehab.”
“And you’ll fight it.”
“And lose,” Sally said. “And then I’ll have the case back in a month or two or five and we’ll start the same cycle again. Listen to me. I’m starting to sound like you.”
“Did you hear the joke Susan just told me?” I asked.
“No.”
“Ask her to tell it to you. I think it will make you smile.”
“Did it make you smile, Lew?”
“No,” I admitted. “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon sometime.”
When we hung up, I turned off the office light, went into my cubbyhole room, hit the light switch, and got undressed. I put on a fresh pair of underwear, turned on the VCR and the television, and popped Forbidden Destiny into the slot.
I watched George Nader and Ern
est Borgnine plan a bank robbery before Claire Collins appeared, her hair swept back, a knowing smile on her face, a dark sweater and skirt, her mouth pouting, her eyes darting.
When it was over, I turned off the television with the remote and lay in the dark listening to the rain.
Tomorrow was a busy day. I hated busy days.
The rain had stopped by morning but the sky was still dark and the DQ parking lot wet with puddles where the concrete was indented. Cars kicked up splashes and small waves on 301. My watch told me it was eight o’clock.
The phone rang. I got to it before the answering machine kicked in.
“Fonesca,” I said.
“You know where the Seventeenth Street softball fields are?” Kevin Hoffmann asked, full of energy.
“I can find them,” I said.
“Go east down Seventeenth past Beneva,” he said. “You’ll see the sign on the right. Drive past the big enclosed field where people run their dogs, and park in the lot. You’ll see the fields. I’ll be at the first diamond on your right.”
“When?”
“If the rain doesn’t come back, we’ll start our first game in about half an hour.”
“I’ve got a ten o’clock appointment,” I said.
“It won’t take long,” he said.
“I can come to your house later,” I said.
“I think it’ll be better if you stay away from my house,” he said.
“And from William Trasker?”
“Healthier,” he said.
“For who?”
“Everyone involved. Get to the game as soon as you can.”
I hung up, checked my watch again. I had time.
I put on clean underwear and my jeans, picked up my clean towel and green plastic bag with my soap, razor, toothbrush and toothpaste, and went out on the landing. The air was heavy and wet and I didn’t want to deal with it.
The rest room was empty. Digger had moved up in the world, at least for now. The mirror could have been cleaner, but it was clean enough to show me the thin, hairy-chested bald man with sad, brown eyes.
“Good morning,” I said to myself.
The guy in the mirror didn’t think so. Besides, he needed a shave. Washed, clean-shaven, and toothbrushed, I left the rest room with the towel around my neck and my green plastic bag under my arm.
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